Samuel Johnson's Eternal Return

“A comic-philosophical novel, the other side of the same coin as Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” —The Wall Street Journal As a boy in an isolated religious community in Pennsylvania, Samuel Johnson sneaks off to watch TV with a neighbor girl—whom he eventually grows up and marries, only to lose her at a young age. When he too dies just a few years later, he inexplicably finds himself in the body of the man who killed him, unable to depart this world but determined, at least, to return to the son he left behind. Moving from body to body as each one expires, Samuel’s soul journeys on a comic quest through an American half-century, inhabiting lives that are as stymied, in their ways, as his own. A ghost story of the most unexpected sort, Martin Riker’s extraordinary debut is “a darkly funny contemporary story” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch) about the ways experience is mediated, the unstoppable drive for human connection, and the struggle to be more fully alive in the world. “Like a television rerun, Samuel’s situation repeats, but the story of his eternal return does end, as all books must, in a manner that is absolutely dazzling.”—Los Angeles Times “Unforgettable.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)